Human to Human (13 page)

“We are only unstable in our relationships with ourselves,” she said. “Would you kill if…”

I certainly didn’t want Karl to overhear this. “I would protect my family,” I told her.

“What protects mine?” she asked. “Don’t try an answer. We found out that humans are a dangerous species, xeno-flips like us.” We had the table at the kitchen door now—odd to have cooperated in carrying it through that verbal exchange. The table, broader than the door was wide, went through on its side. On the counter, food plates sat on heating or cooling trays, a material like soapstone that soaked up heat or cold in the microwave or flash cooler, then kept foods hot or cold for hours

Chi’ursemisa didn’t say more, just curled up against Hurdai on the coffee table seat and tapped him with her fingers. Sensing possible code, I stiffened, but what could I do? The message was passed. If Chi’ursemisa now feared humans as potential xenophobic sapient killers, I decided that I could stand our xeno-flip reputation. Then, an instant later, I was slightly ashamed of myself.

Hurdai said, “Your Federation has teeth.”

Karl and Daiur stopped eating and stared up at us as though grownups were the aliens. “Yes,” I said, thinking of the control box in the drawer about ten feet away.

We finished the meal in silence.

∞ ∞ ∞

That night, as I sat on her bed and watched Marianne brush her hair, I said, “Maybe if we can get through this, we can become Rector’s People.”

The brush stopped. She looked at me, first directly, then through the mirror. “You want to become a Rector’s Person?”

I wasn’t sure of the tone. “Isn’t it okay?”

“You’re finally getting to be personally ambitious?” She smiled. I felt like I was sixteen again, but perhaps not the sixteen I’d been in those real years. Maybe I’d regressed to what I’d have been at sixteen in a normal life.

I said, “If we can be good with these people, we can be good with anyone.”

“And if Earth never makes it, maybe we can be Rector,” she said.

That had never occurred to me. “Is that how you’re handling Weiss’s attitude?”

Rectors had to be from people in the Federation for four hundred years or refugees—settled in or free of planetary politics. Rector. I’d never considered that before; the thought chilled me. There was a farfetched logic to it. I could stand not seeing more humans than the ones we had on Karst now.

Marianne said, “Karriaagzh began his career as a Rector’s Person.”

I said, “If we can bring Chi’ursemisa and Hurdai to see the Federation terms as good, we will look quite competent.” I realized how formally we were speaking, as though we were exchanging vows. An ambition I wasn’t sure I should be proud of had hooked me. I got off the bed and hugged Marianne, half little boy, half future leader.

After Marianne was asleep, I went to the kitchen and got the controller, sat in the darkness holding it.

∞ ∞ ∞

The next morning, I slid the controller in my tunic pocket when we all—Marianne, the kids, the adult Sharwani—went walking through the back parks.

Chi’ursemisa went ahead, head constantly turning. She knelt so long by a small plant with blue flowers that we had to wait for her; then she came almost jogging up to us. She darted her hand toward the pocket where I had my right hand over the control box. When I clenched my fist harder over it, she said, “I suspect we are not completely free even if we don’t have skull computers that double as tracking devices.”

Alien thing against my brain—I didn’t want to think about it. Chi’ursemisa looked from me to Marianne. We’d both stopped. Marianne looked more upset about the computer than I’d ever been.

“The Federation doesn’t trust itself,” Chi’ursemisa said.

Hurdai said, “Chi’ursemisa, did you expect them to just turn us loose?”

“No.”

We walked on by the bird platform houses, all their family activities outside—the toilets open to view.

Chi’ursemisa and Hurdai began looking at each other rolling their feet over so that they walked on the outside edges. Chi’ursemisa asked, “Are you trying to hurt us?”

“What?”

“The long foot travel, the displays of creatures.”

“I’m sorry. We can take a bus home.”

“If we turn back now, I think we’ll be all right,” Hurdai said.

Daiur said, “I’m too tired.”

Marianne said, “Come on, I’ll carry you.”

Karl said, “I’m not tired.”

Chi’ursemisa and Hurdai moaned a little as Daiur went up to Marianne. She swung him around to her back and said, “Chi’ursemisa, do you need to walk in front of me or behind?”

“Either way.”

As we walked back, Hurdai stopped for a second, staring at one of the bear-types, totally furred, about his height. The bear pushed back the hair on his face, cheekbones not so angular as the Sharwani’s, and asked, “Hello, Hurdai. Are you looking for someone like me?”

Hurdai said nothing. We were being watched, and it both relieved and irritated me.

When we got home, Chi’ursemisa sat down on the floor by the couch and covered her face with her arms, knees up against her belly. She trembled. When Marianne set Daiur down, he knelt by his mother, but did not touch her. Hurdai sat down, took off his shoes and massaged his feet. He had five toes, but two big toes instead of one, with matted fur on top of them.

“Can we help?” Marianne asked.

“She’s stuck,” Hurdai said, “between being us and becoming what you are.”

Chi’ursemisa pitched backward, knees still bent, catching herself with
her hands just before her head smacked against the floor. Daiur crept around to her head and touched her face as if reading the muscles like braille. He said, “Mommy, nobody has hurt me.”

She said something in her own language and then told Marianne, “Please don’t translate.”

Marianne said, “I hate being a jailer.” I was afraid Marianne had given Chi’ursemisa a mental trick to use against her.

Hurdai climbed to his feet and said, “Can we set up a television in our room if your programs are entertaining?

Marianne said, 
“Show them a xenophobia holo. I’ve got Karriaagzh’s here. And see if you can get Support to put in a terminal for them.”

“Marianne, maybe that holo would scare them?”

“What is a xenophobia holo?” Chi’ursemisa asked.

“It makes the fears seem funny,” I said.

Chi’ursemisa sat up and huddled tighter, arms and feet intertwined. She squeezed once especially hard, then relaxed. “Funny fear of the bird who broke my wrist? I must see this.”

Hurdai said, “Perhaps not.”

“Yes,” Chi’ursemisa said. “I need funny fear.” Marianne set up the holo tank and player head, explaining as she did, “Karriaagzh, when young, was terrified of some mammals’ fear of him. So he played with the fear.”

I had seen the holo before, but now, I noticed more: Karriaagzh’s head bobbing back, eyes wide open and glossy, his hands picking at his mangled feathers.

“Stop it,” Chi’ursemisa said. “Help me stop it.”

Marianne flipped the switch on the thing as I reached for the plug. Hurdai said, “Thank you, we’ve seen enough.”

“I don’t know if you really saw—”

“Don’t you respect pain?” Chi’ursemisa said, not facing any of us. She got up and went into the polycarb-fronted room. Hurdai picked up Daiur and followed her.

Marianne began pacing, then, after several tight circles, stopped and shook her hands as if they were wet. “Marianne, I can get you a controller,” I said after we heard the drapery rings hiss across the rods.

“Oh, just let them kill us. Who are they that we’ve got a right to keep them prisoner?”

“I saw them bomb Ersh’s planet.”

“They? Chi’ursemisa and Hurdai? Daiur?
Daiur?
If Daiur’s responsible for the bombing, maybe I should arrest you for Ku Klux Klan lynchings?”

“They were on Ersh’s planet.”

Marianne calmed down a bit, then said, “I don’t really think either of them would hurt Karl. Beyond that, what would I do if they attacked us?”

“The controller won’t kill them. It just disrupts skeletal muscle control.”

She said, “I don’t,
goddamn it,
want one. Ersh’s people let the Sharwani—”

“It was blackmail, terrorism,” I said.

“Shut up, or they’ll hear us,” Marianne said.

“Who started shouting?” I asked. “We’re supposed to show them how people can live together.”

“And conspecifics can’t fight?” She continued in a calmer voice, “If we can’t get pissed with each other without threatening the Federation, then the Federation is too damn fragile.”

The next morning, Chi’ursemisa came out of the polycarb room, alone. I heard Hurdai and Daiur talking to Marianne. Chi’ursemisa sat down on the floor and said, “I heard you both arguing last night.” She looked very alien, vaguely catlike curled up against a chair leg, eyes half-closed. “The muscle-control implants are reasonable. If your federation had turned us loose with only its language to shape us, that would be stupid. I don’t like stupidities based on principles.”

I realized I could interpret what Chi’ursemisa had said to mean that she didn’t like Marianne, but I decided to leave that implication buried and simply said, “Are you typical of Sharwani? I haven’t known that many.”

“I’m not typical. Perhaps you should meet more,” she replied, rubbing her nails with a little round stone. I wondered where she got the stone. Maybe she had one of the Barcons rig her up something like her home nail-keeping equipment? “I can meet more. We’ve got one hundred-twenty-seven Sharwani couples and fifty-seven Sharwani children here in various households, plus other Sharwani on other planets.”

“And you think there are other Sharwani here, disguised?”

I said, “Yes.”

She said, “What do you think my policies, personal policies, are?”

I had no idea. “What were they before Karriaagzh brought you here?” That seemed a good question.

She said, “Complex. Life is always complex. You have a fighting alien here in this building, bird-stock. Granite Grit?”

He’s more than a fighting alien.”

She rolled the stone between her two bands, then took off her shoes and began buffing and shaping her toenails with it. Seeing her do that was slightly off putting.

I asked, “Did you think the Sharwani had a right to dominate Ersh’s people?”

“Instead of the Federation dominating?”

I said, “The Federation isn’t like that.”

She said, “Maureen Ree thinks it is brutal.”

Crack her high pointy cheekbones one,
a country voice in me said, as if Warren had gone to live in my brain when he died. “Don’t try that,” I said.

“Violence isn’t that alien to you,” she said, looking up but still rolling the stone between her hands, her legs spraddled, kneeling. Damn her, she could read humans better than I could read Sharwani.

“So,” I said, trying to sound dumb-ass, “maybe we could have some private talks with disguised Sharwani?”

She said, “Perhaps,” and caught her little stone in one hand. Did it have a Sharwani code chipped on it—tactile swollen fingertips reading it? Her fingertips were flaccid now. I tried to remember what they’d looked like when she’d been using the stone on her nails. She said, “Perhaps,” again, as if she knew what I thought, to stare at her fingers so.

We Sharwani keepers met again at the Institute of Control. When Granite Grit and I came into the room, Ersh was sitting beside another Sharwan. The new Sharwan looked up at me, then at Granite as if memorizing our faces.

I stared at him. One cheekbone was crushed. A huge scar ran from
above his right eyebrow down to his chin, which seemed to have crumbled under a blow. The scar skipped across his eyelid, but the skin there looked raw, as though medics had regenerated his eye. A creature mean enough to make the slash wouldn’t have stopped to save an eye.

Ersh said, “This one was a friend to my people. His own tortured him.”

“I am Drusah, and I was decorated for this.” His index finger cut through the air over his scar.
By us?
I must have looked puzzled, because he said, “For bravery by the Uka Sharwanah. My species understands honor. Your attitude contributes to the problem with us.” He pronounced the plural more
ah
than
ee.
He wasn’t from the same language group as Chi’ursemisa and Hurdai.

Ersh’s scales rose slightly, then flicked down. “The Uka Sharwani are savages.”

“No,” Drusah said, “Sharwani are the most various people in the Universe.”

The Barcon Institute of Control officiator leading our group said, “One sees more diversity in species familiar to one.” In Karst, “one” is a real distancer.

“We have over a thousand language groups, over two thousand cultural groups, although only ten are dominant.”

“Earth has at least that many,” I said.

“And do you recognize courage as a virtue even when used against you?”